Graveyards and Confessions
by spnfandom8
Summary: Jason's head snaps up when Hotch settles in against the gravestone to the right of his mothers, his legs bent and his arms resting on his knees, head tipped back against the gravestone behind him. Almost mirroring Jason's pose.


One-Shot

**AN Enjoy. **

Jason Todd doesn't move from his spot on the freezing ground, not when he sees red and blue lights and hears police sirens. Not when he sees a man clad in black running full tilt in his direction. He doesn't move when the man runs past him, his lip does twitch though when the man trips over his extended leg, crashing hard to the cold, wet ground.

He moves once when the man scrambles to get up, wiping mud away from his eyes to try and see who, or what, tripped him. Jason moves to pull one of his guns from the holster on his side, aiming it at the mans head without picking his head up from where it rests against the top of his mother's gravestone.

"Don't move" he says blankly, waiting for the thundering footsteps to make their way to where they sit in the dark.

"What the fuck man?" the guy calls, obviously not liking what's happening.

"Don't. Fucking. Move." Jason grinds out, not in the mood for any of this shit, and not liking the grating sound of his voice after two days of not talking.

"Fuck this" the guy mutters as he tries to make a break for it, Jason calmly changes the body part his gun is pointed at and fires, shooting the man in the knee and bringing him back to the ground.

"I said. Don't. Move." Jason growls, unhappy with the way his night is turning out.

He keeps his gun trained on the man as he brings the bottle of whiskey in his hand to his mouth, taking a longdrag and ignoring the high pitched screams emanating from the man beside him.

The gunshot and screams alerted the police, or what Jason had thought was the police, but turns out to be FBI agents _and_ the police. FBI agents who are surrounding him and the man, yelling at him to get up, to drop his weapon, to put his hands in the air.

He does none of those things.

He's too tired to stand.

Too tired to care.

Too exhausted to give a fuck whether one of them shoots him or not.

He feels a dull pang of surprise when he catches sight of a familiar face in the fray, but it quickly fades into the gnarled mess of his emotions, leaving him blank once more.

He drops the hand holding his gun to the ground when someone takes the screaming man away from the scene, and a few muttered words to the lead agent has the police leaving the scene, criminal in tow.

He silently thanks the man when the graveyard is left bathed in only the headlights of two cars. Happy that the blinding, flashing lights, sirens, and bustle of too many people in too tight a space, finally leave, letting the pounding in his head quiet down into a dull throbbing.

He continues to ignore the three guns still pointed at him, and he knows that the familiar face hasn't caught a good enough look at _his_ to recognise him yet. The guns will go away when he does. Probably.

It takes Jason a moment to re-tune into his hearing, having been filtering the annoying, droning demands from the gun wielding Feds out. He regrets his decision immediately after he makes it, hating the grating noise, the loud voices yelling orders at him.

He tosses another silent thank you at the feet of the lead agent once more, when he tells the agents to lower their weapons and to calm down, that Jason isn't a threat, at least not to them.

Jason flinches when he feels the warm weight of someone's hand settle onto his left knee, which is quite close to his face, and it takes him a moment to focus his vision on the face in front of him.

"Jason?" the man calls as Jason pours another generous mouthful of whiskey down his throat, further impeding his senses, his reaction time, his consciousness, emotions.

"Hey Aaron" he says, with a surprisingly small amount of slurring considering the amount of alcohol he's consumed in the last twenty something hours.

"What are you doing here?" he asks, and Jason laughs, a dopey smile on his face that he doesn't feel, the sound coming out of his throat rough and mocking.

"Don't worry. You don't have to come up with some extravagant excuse as to why you didn't come to visit me. I know you've been in town for almost two weeks. I knew the moment you came over the bridge, actually." Jason says, his eyes having trouble focussing on the man crouching in front of him.

"I was gon-" Jason cuts him off.

"I didn't plan to run into you here. Coincidence, I guess. You were here, chasing the guy that's been killing all those guys. I'm here, because it was my '_mothers' _funeral today, not that you would have known, or cared. You've got the perfect little family waiting for you up in quantico…. Oh wait, karma got your ass on that one, huh? She left you. Took the kid…" Jason trails off, ignoring the thunderous look on Hotch's face.

"You have no right!-" Jason cuts him off again.

"I have every fucking right! You had a one night stand with my mother while you and your perfect little girlfriend were taking a 'break'. You didn't even use a fucking condom. God, if you want your dirty little secrets to stay secret, my advice, wrap it the fuck up." Jason spits, a disgusted look painting his face, smoothing away a moment later to reveal another forced smile.

"I figured out who you were when I was nine, by the way. I don't think I ever told you that. Bruce tracked you down when I was fourteen, but you didn't want anything to do with me then, so I guess it was a good thing I never tried to get into contact with you when I first figured out who you were." Jason says, huffing out a humorless laugh.

"It's not that I didn't want anything to do with you Jason. You were in the first stable home you had ever been in. You had a family. You didn't want anything to do with _me._" Hotch argues.

"Did it ever occur to you that a kid as fucked in the head as I was ... wasn't willing to put his heart on the line for a chance, a small chance, that his biological father would want a relationship? Did it occur to you that I was protecting myself? From you, from being let down, from a long line of people who had convinced me to trust them, only to get my heart fucking shattered every. single. time. Did it occur to you, that I was just a scared little kid who had lost it all enough times to know not to bet on anything but a certainty?" Jason says, his voice a low growl.

"You had a family. You had a home. You had more opportunities than I ever could have offered you. You had a family that would have been there for you when you needed it-" Hotch gets cut off

"I have nothing!" Jason screams into Hotch's face, his blue/green eyes flashing with a barely restrained rage. "I've never had anything!Those opportunities went to shit along with my mental stability, that_ family _replaced and forgot about me, the home went down the drain with my family and my mental health. They weren't there when I needed them, You weren't there, she was_ never_ there. nobody is ever _fucking_ there when I need them. I've got exactly two friends, two _people, _that I give a fuck about in this world, but I can't let myself break in front of them, because i'm not the only one who's hurting, and if I break, so will they.

"And I've been sitting here. All day, in the pouring fucking rain, trying to make myself care, or cry, or grieve for her. And so far the only thing I've managed to get myself is a probable case of fucking pneumonia. _I hated her. _She was a terrible mother, and all that I feel now that she's gone is relief, I feel free, and that is ... _Fucked. Up._ So I've been sitting here since everyone else, which was two people, by the way, left. Trying to feel something _other_ than this _fucked_ sense of relief that she's no longer in this world, that she isn't a fucking liability to me anymore, that I don't have to worry that she's gonna call and i'll come running because even though I hate her, she's still my fucking mother, and i've never been able to leave her to destroy_ herself, _instead of _me,_ not when she begs me to stay.

"So the more I try to care, to feel, and the more I fail, the more I hate myself. Because how fucked up do you really have to be, to feel relieved and almost, _happy_, that your mother is dead? She never abused me, not physically anyway, she didn't stop her boyfriends when they beat on me, and she never took my side when I got into fights with them, but she never hit me. She did try to sell me once, though. To pay off a debt to some shitty gang that she was buying from. The uh, _sale, _didn't end up going through, cause' I ran away and didn't come back for three months. I was six, and I wondered, if-if my dad were out there, somewhere, if he would have cared, or if he would have been just like her. You aren't like her though, you're worse. Cause' she was sick, I know that she was sick, and that's why she was the way that she was. And it doesn't make it alright, but it makes sense. You, are worse, because you don't have an excuse, you aren't sick... just cruel_._ I wanted to get to know you, and you were never there. I wasn't going to put myself in a place where you could hurt me, but some part of me did assume that if you cared about me, that you would make the effort, that you would put _yourself, _out there. That you would put yourself in a place to be rejected by the kid that you abandoned. You didn't though. I wasn't enough. I will _never_ be enough. _And I hate you too."_Jason snarls, his face twisted in this sick expression, halfway between smiling and pure, unadulterated rage.

"I hate you for never being there when I needed you. I hate you for always choosing them over me. I hate you for being a shitty sperm donor, and I hate you for conceiving me in the first place. I am one mistake after the other, one fuck-up after another, piling up until they create a person. That stable home that I have is gone, the family that I thought I could count on betrayed me and replaced me as soon as I was gone ….. Every. Thing. Every,_ miniscule,_ thing, that I made for myself, gone. I have been stripped of everything I have, everything I _am_, so many times, that I don't have a single fucking thing left to give but hate, and i'm giving it freely." Jason says, not paying any attention to the tears falling down his cheeks, nor the wrecked look on his biological fathers face, or the stunned and resounding silence of the people who are still surrounding them.

"I hate her, I hate you, I hate Bruce, I hate this shitty fucking life. I hate that I can't muster one ounce of fucking grief, after sitting here, at her grave, for hours. I hate that your mistakes turned into something that you could ignore and that I have to live with_ forever. _I hate that the only things that I feel anymore, are rage and terror. I am so fucking angry at the world, and I wake up every morning terrified from another nightmare, and all it does is make me angrier. It's this never ending circle, and I can't get out, and I can't quit this life, because I know what it's like on the other side, and it isn't anything great. It's actually a whole lot of mind splitting _nothing." _Jason says, a gritty laugh tearing from his throat.

"Just. Leave me the fuck alone. Tell whoever whatever and then leave. Get out of this city and please, don't ever come back." Jason finishes, all of the fight leaving his body as he relaxes once more against his mothers gravestone, his blue-green eyes fluttering closed.

"No." Hotch answers, a defiant look set deep in the lines of his face.

"Get the fuck away from me Aaron" Jason says, anger lighting his tone once more, although he doesn't bother to open his eyes.

Jason thinks he's won when Aaron moves away from him, walking a few gravestones away and pulling his phone from his pocket. He doesn't bother to listen in on the conversation, instead focusing on the other people still scattered in a loose half-circle around him, their guns hanging by their sides and their body language screaming uncomfortable.

Jason's head snaps up when Hotch settles in against the gravestone to the right of his mothers, his legs bent and his arms resting on his knees, head tipped back against the gravestone behind him. Almost mirroring Jason's pose.

"I'm sorry. I'm a profiler. I should have known. Should have realised. I should have been better. And i'm sorry." Hotch says, not bothered when Jason doesn't respond. He isn't apologising for his own benefit, he doesn't need to be forgiven. He doesn't want to be forgiven. He's apologising because he wants Jason to know that he made too many mistakes with him, and that he's _sorry. _

Hotch's team, meanwhile, are feeling more and more like they are intruding on a deeply personal interaction than they are on a case. It doesn't take them long to scatter to the cars, escaping the cold drizzle of rain and unable to stop themselves from profiling the young man who is apparently Hotch's son.

Meanwhile, Hotch and Jason are sitting in silence, neither of them willing to break the silence, even though they are both dying to fill it with something, anything.

The longer they sit in silence, the more Hotch begins to notice. Begins to notice the scars across Jason's hands, the ones crawling up his neck and into his hairline, and the ones on his face. He notices that Jason is shaking, and has been for a while. He realises that the pneumonia joke Jason made earlier is closer to the truth than he's comfortable with. He studies the white streak through the front of his hair, and the blue-green of his eyes, even though he knows for a fact that his eyes were a definitive bright blue before he disappeared three years prior.

"What happened to your eyes?" Hotch asks, his voice just barely audible through the now-pouring rain.

"Magic" Jason responds a few minutes later, taking the time to figure out how to answer that question.

"They were uh, this really unnatural green for a while." Jason says, wanting to fill the silence.

Another awkward pause fills the space between them.

"You don't hate Bruce" Hotch finally says, stating a fact instead of asking a question.

"Yes, I do" Jason answers, his voice growling and rough.

"No. You don't. You hate me, and you hate your mother, rightfully, on both accounts. You don't hate Bruce though. Bruce hurt you, I don't know how, I don't know why, I don't know anything about what happened between you and him. But you don't hate him. I can hear it in your voice, see it in your body language when you talk about him. He hurt you, but you don't hate him. You want to, but you can't." Hotch tells him, expecting backlash for stating what he knows.

Jason doesn't say anything for a long few minutes.

"_He's my dad….._ You might be my biological father, but he is my dad. He-he sat with me through nightmares, and he bandaged my injuries, and he taught me how to trust. He gave me a home, for the first time in my life, not a house, a home. He taught me how to cook, and he understood the difference when I was lashing out because I was really angry, or when I was lashing out because I was scared or hurting. And he hated that I drank and smoked and cursed like a fucking sailor, but he didn't judge me because of it. He stayed with me, all night, when I was too scared to go to sleep, and he read to me when I just _couldn't _fall asleep. He figured out how to intercept my panic attacks and he used to know all of my triggers like the back of his hand. He believed me when people at school accused me of doing shit that I didn't do and I told him that I didn't, even though I have a rap sheet a mile long and a history of getting into fights and destroying property, including his. He's my dad.

"And then, then a series of fucked up events occurred. And somebody hurt me, bad, and I disappeared for two years. And when I got back, Bruce didn't, he didn't do what I thought he should have to the man that hurt me. And he replaced me with some rich kid. And i'm so fucking angry, but I still can't hate him, and that just makes me angrier." Jason says, and although it hurts Aaron to hear it, he knows that he can only blame himself. He didn't push to be a part of Jason's life. Bruce did.

He's about to answer when another car pulls up at the graveyard, and a young man jumps out and runs over to where the two of them are sitting.

"_Little wing" _he states as he crouches down in front of his younger brother, concern etched into his face, his tone.

"What are you doing here Dick?" Jason asks, confusion blanketing his expression.

"Aaron called me" Dick answers, and Jason's eyes narrow, flitting between his brother and Aaron.

"Why?" Jason asks a moment later.

"He's worried Jaybird, didn't know what to do, but he wasn't just gonna leave you to freeze to death in a graveyard." Dick says, worry and concern radiating off of him, his mother hen tendencies kicking into overdrive.

"Let's go. You're staying at my place tonight, and until I confirm that you haven't actually given yourself pneumonia" Dick says, ignoring the way the rain plasters his hair to his face, rivulets of water pouring down his face as the rain picks up once more.

"I'm fine." Jason answers, and Dick rolls his eyes dramatically.

"You are the opposite of fine little wing, and it wasn't a request. We're going back to my apartment. Now. You are going to shower, and then I am making hot chocolate and we are going to watch movies until you want to talk to me. This isn't negotiable. It's happening." Dick says, his tone authoritative and leaving no room for arguments, although if Jason is honest with himself, he doesn't really want to argue anyway.

He nods his head, letting Dick pull him to his feet by his wrists before looking down at Aaron.

"I'll call you sometime" Aaron says as he pushes himself to standing, waiting for Jason to nod his consent before moving to the cars filled with his team. He watches as Dick winds his arm around Jason's waist to keep him from stumbling too much as he guides him to his car, gently depositing him in the passenger's seat before settling himself in the drivers.

Dick throws a sad smile and a half wave Hotch's way as he pulls out of the graveyard. And Hotch ignores the tension in the car as he pulls onto the deserted street, making his way back to their hotel and thanking all that is holy that his team knows him well enough to stay quiet during the drive.

He knows that it won't last, that by the time they are loading onto the jet tomorrow morning, he's going to have a whole team of profilers up his ass about tonight, he knows he's going to have to answer their questions. He's dreading it, but he's also just glad that he'll have tonight to think over what to tell them. He'll have the whole night to lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and feeling like the silence is crushing him, wondering when he thought what he was doing with Jason was the right thing. When he convinced himself that what he was doing was for Jason's benefit. When he, as a profiler, missed everything wrong and hurting with Jason, when he missed the pain that he was in and the constant flow of rage racing through his veins. When he fucked up so badly, that the one person he didn't want to hurt, was the one he hurt the most.

He met Jason when he was fourteen, found out about him when he was fourteen. And all he wanted to do was protect him. But he saw how much Bruce, Dick, and Alfred loved the boy. How much good they did for him, how much trust they had gained, and then Jason stared at him with those untrusting eyes, a hint of fear permeating the air around the boy, and he knew, he _thought _he knew what was best for him. He thought that leaving him with the people that loved him, the people that he trusted, was best. He saw how much Jason fit into that family, and how much he _didn't _fit with Hotch's. How much he didn't like Haley, and how distrustful he was of Hotch, the uncomfortable edge to his body language when he found out that Hotch was a fed.

So Hotch backed off. He stepped back, thinking that that was what was best.

He was so _devastatingly _wrong, and he doesn't think it's something that can be fixed, but _fuck_ if he isn't going to try.

**AN Thoughts? Good? Bad? Meh? Lemme know what you think. :) **


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